Comedy
by kangeiko
Summary: There is an old joke... Jack/Nadia.


Title: Comedy

Thanks to athena25 for the beta.

Dedication: for monanotlisa, my poor sweet honeypie.

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*

_March 15th, 00:10 - Burundi._

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_

There is an old joke that isn't particularly funny and it swirls around the porcelain basin along with the spatter of tapwater.

_Masochist to sadist: Hurt me, hurt me._

Nadia spits, toothpaste and mouthwash combined, and splashes water at her face as she straightens up. The bathroom cabinet is a piece of the 70s, all cheap ugly plastic and too-thin mirror plate glued to the front. The reflective surface is peeling away at the corners in crispy little flakes of light.

In the harsh neon brightness of the cramped bathroom, with mildew seeping into every crack and corner, the bruise across her cheekbone looks as green as freshly cut grass.

_Sadist to masochist: No._

She pats her face dry with a towel of questionable cleanness and switches the bathroom light off. She can hear Jack's low, even breathing in the next room as he forces his body into deep sleep in what could well be record time, even for a field agent.

She debates going back into the bedroom. Instead, she carefully lowers the toilet seat cover down and sits on the cold plastic, twisting the towel into knots and wondering what the hell she's doing.

*  
_Three days earlier - somewhere in southern Guatemala._

_*  
_

Nadia swung a wild punch, putting all her weight into it, aiming at Jack's gritted jaw. The blow would have broken it, maybe. Had her fist connected, certainly; it would have come up a nice purple bruise. But blood and oil made her grip on the handrail tenuous and she slipped as she swung, the punch going wild. Jack neatly sidestepped as she went sprawling, and his booted foot cracked Nadia's ribs, a splintering pain spiralling out from the impact. The momentum flipped her over; once; twice; and as she staggered to her feet, Jack took another step back.

The extra three feet this bought them was more than enough room to pick off all the eager would-be guerrillas crowding around them.

"I'm sorry," she said afterwards, rubbing her sore side and signalling into her handset for early retrieval. "It was my fault. I shouldn't have been seen."

"We all have bad days," Jack said quietly, then reached out a hand to her cheek. "You should get some ice on that; it'll bruise." His fingers stopped a centimetre from her skin.

Back at A.P.O., Nadia stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror for a long time. When she forgot to get her cheek seen to, it was almost a genuine accident.

*

_March 15th, 00:12 - Burundi._

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"Are you planning to sleep in the bathroom?"

Nadia wonders what it says about her that she wishes Weiss were here. Not _here_ as in Jack's place: more like, _here_, as in _hers_. There isn't a reason for staying in the bathroom with the delightful roaches scuttling noisily that doesn't involve explaining emotion-related things to Jack Bristow. In her mind, she can already see his face harden into impassivity as she trips uncertainly through her thoughts, picking out the ones that make the most sense to attempt an actual reason for thinking this is a bad idea. Other than the obvious, of course.

'The obvious' is waiting back at A.P.O., having a strangely inappropriate lunch with Sydney. Then again, Jack is wearing nothing but his camo trousers, slung low, and his feet are bare on the bathroom floor. The 'agent' part of Nadia notes that he has a series of tiny white scars across his toes that pick out the moonlight: scars too small to do that, really. It takes her several seconds to realise that they're burn scars, and another few to realise that she's been staring at his feet for a while.

"This is a bad idea," she says. She studies the fall of the fatigues along his legs, dragging her gaze across his torso to his face. It is not a pretty journey. Jack has the entire world mapped across his body: an angry, jagged knife wound on his shoulder; Laos, she remembers her father saying once. Another one - smaller and tighter - just seen on the jut of his right hip spells out Smolensk. The gunshots peppering his torso mark Berlin and Cuba and Harare on the map of his flesh; the burns are the spill of rivers in London and Rio de Janeiro. (The burn scars are the most recent, she knows: Agent Jones that sits three desks behind them at A.P.O. HQ has matching ones across her dainty feet. Agent Jones, she also knows, has been signed off for medical reasons for the past three weeks.)

There is an unseen, uneven swell of flesh on his left thigh, carefully writing out the topology of Ho Chi Min city: a leg, broken and reset.

(That one was during Sydney's fifth birthday. Sydney had confided to her how angry she had been to not have her daddy there, and how guilty she had felt those many years later.)

"I wasn't under any illusions," Jack said quietly. His eyes were brittle.

"Right," Nadia said, a little numb. "Right."

*  
_March 14th, 08:34 - A.P.O._

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Uniform of the day was olive-green fatigues and blue beret; UN badge on prominent display. Nadia and Jack would accompany a food shipment to the village, then go to ground in the forest until Kuto turned up to collect all the food, shoot a few villagers, smuggle some diamonds - the usual. And Jack would then -

Jack would shoot him in the head and think nothing of it.

Nadia hated this approach and always logged a complaint. It wasn't the fact that it was unethical, but the sheer body count was enough to make your stomach turn, or your heart clench. That is, if you had a stomach, or a heart. As her objection was, once again, noted and overruled, Nadia wondered if Jack Bristow had either. His world was composed thus: Sydney; her mother; her father; the rest of the world. Actually, that wasn't true; Nadia wasn't sure whether the rest of the world even featured on Jack's radar. Men like Jack - like her father - were fighting the good fight, and for no reasons at all that Nadia could discern.

It wasn't the assassination that she had a problem with. It _wasn't_, no matter what Jack's annoying, dry-as-dust tone implied, begging pardon for an imagined slight against her high-brow sense of morality. "If you have a _problem_ with the direct approach -"

"I'd slit the bastard's throat myself if it would be more efficient," Nadia interrupted, and didn't flinch as he stared at her sceptically. "But staging a massacre to lure him out of hiding is inhuman. I can't believe Sydney agreed to this!"

Her father wouldn't look at her. After a moment, Jack glanced away too, gaze fixing on a spot three inches above her left eyebrow. "We leave in three hours," he said instead.

Right.

She bit the inside of her mouth; right beneath where the bruise he had so expertly inflicted on her was slowly blooming.

*  
_March 15th, 01:25 - Burundi_

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"I don't think that this should happen again," Nadia says once more, still slightly out of breath.

Jack doesn't look at her. "It won't." His grip on her wrist tightens, and Nadia thinks, oh, that's going to bruise.

*  
_March 15th, 23:15 - transatlantic flight no: BA9456, Bujumbura - Los Angeles_

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"You should get that seen to," Jack says quietly. His eyes are gentle on her, gentler than his hands could ever be, and his gaze rests on the bruises peppering her neck. To an unpractised eye, they might look like marks of love.

Nadia does not answer, and Jack does not press her. Instead, she wraps her arms tightly about herself, and stares out of the window, unseeing. Below them, the clouds frame Bujumbura's lights in soft focus and her eyes blur.

*

fin


End file.
